With 84 sites across Australia and approximately 45,000 contractors and 1,250 staff, Vicinity Centres is one of Australia’s leading retail property groups. Vicinity either partly or fully owns and maintains shopping centres in a comprehensive management arrangement. This includes managing contractors involved in services from cleaning to security to maintenance, in addition to managing all the tenants’ leasing. Vicinity also manage the operational aspects of their sites, to ensure a positive retail experience for shoppers and retailers alike.

One of the core values of Vicinity is that they are ‘committed to providing a safe and healthy environment for team members, contractors, retailers, visitors and customers’. As part of their desire to reach this goal, Vicinity contacted Rapid Global to find out how they could get their contractors and employees inducted through their site and safety inductions in a more streamlined manner. At the time, all of their contractors were required to complete face-to-face inductions each time they went to a new site. Information about the contractors and their companies was frequently kept within each site, so they were required to bring their documentation and complete new inductions each time they went to another shopping centre. This was extremely time consuming and led Vicinity to seek an alternative solution for the issue.

THE SOLUTION

With the implementation of Rapid Induct and Rapid Contractor Management, contractors now complete their entire registration process and all inductions online. When the contractor first registers with Vicinity, they upload all their required insurance documents, which are then reviewed online by Rapid Global and verified if satisfactory. If they have the correct documentation then they are made compliant and can issue passwords to their own staff or contractors, who then receive the passwords via email and compete their inductions online. The inductions include questions for them to answer to achieve a pass mark for the course. Once the induction has been successfully completed, Rapid Global mails out an ID card to the inductee. They then use this ID card to enter a site using Rapid Access Systems, which has also been implemented at Vicinity.

“The overall feedback is that Rapid is easy to use and a great time saver.”

– Glenn Ford, Shopping Centre Safety Manager at Vicinity Centres

There are currently 112 terminals spread out across the Vicinity’s sites and counting. On average, each site has 2 terminals, which are usually located in the Security Office and the reception area. Contractors use the swipe-card reader at the terminal to sign in, while visitors and tenant contractors get wearable labels printed. These labels provide greater security with a visual identification mark so Vicinity know which tenant contractors or visitors have correctly signed into site and completed the necessary induction. Furthermore, there are a number of sites where Vicinity currently use 4G mobile internet dongles, which enhance the efficiency of the terminals and limit their down time. Glenn Ford, the Shopping Centre Safety Manager at Vicinity Centres, said that implementing Rapid Access Systems at Vicinity has resulted in ‘substantial time and cost savings and greater oversight of contractors’.

THE RESULTS

Having one central repository for all the information about each contracting company has streamlined processes at Vicinity enormously. Rather than having to check with other sites to find information about each company every time a new contractor arrives on a different site, administrators can simply log on to the MyRapid portal and view all the information they require. This means at any given time there is transparency and ease of access of information for those requiring it. It also causes less duplication of data, which results in time and cost savings.

“From my perspective, at a national level, it’s that oversight function. It streamlines processes – we can check if people are inducted on site really quickly, which is a wonderful thing. We don’t have to be running back to offices to check for paperwork or anything of that nature.”

Contracting companies can also issue and complete site inductions at any convenient time as soon as they know they need to enter site, rather than having to wait to complete a full day induction on-site. This allows the contracting company to have control over their inductions, while also giving Vicinity administrators the ability to alter information for any given contractor or company if required. This means that when contractors arrive on site, they are compliant and ready to begin their work. This then allows Vicinity Centres to focus on what they do best – providing positive retail experiences across Australia.

“There are less surprises when we use Rapid. As contractor information is accessible via the Rapid website, we can access the right data at the right time.”